Intercom vs Zendesk: 2023 Explicit Comparison

According to stats from Kayako, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that offers live chat support. This proves that implementing a live chat tool on your website is crucial metadialog.com if you want to tap into the benefits it provides. You pay a monthly fee for a product, and then there is – sorry – there’s a monthly fee for the product which is tied to actual people.

Check out the Help Scout Integrations page to see all the integrations we’ve built. Reflect on what your goals are and which features are most important to your business. Choosing the right platform is much easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then, it’s simply a case of testing different options and seeing what works for your team. These 13 Intercom alternatives provide great options for sales, marketing, and support help for your business.

Introduction to Intercom & Zendesk

Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

• When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.
• Quickly, do a quick, you know, the different plans here, essentially the pro and the premium, just look at the different differences real quick.
• Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions.
• The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity.
• You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
• With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch.

You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Zendesk is one of the most widely known help desk tools out there. Check these 7 Zendesk alternatives that will help you improve your customer support, sales, and marketing. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people.

Service Hub is the Leader in Customer Service

A downside regarding the NLP of Drift is that it doesn’t understand the user intent, which makes Intercom the winner in this crucially-important category. To get started, you can simply use its visual flow builder to set up your chatbot flow and customize it to suit your preference. For instance, you can use the flow builder to organize how you want your chatbot page to look by adding predefined rules. Teams waste time, energy, and revenue opportunities when they don’t have what they need in one place. With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch. Front is built for collaboration at scale, so customers always get an authentic, thorough reply.

This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management. As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to.

Zendesk vs. Intercom pricing

Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows.

Increasingly, however, businesses are finding that current live chat platforms such as Intercom are falling flat due to a frustrating lack of functionality. Ultimately, this results in a poor customer experience, putting off prospective customers, disappointing existing ones, and negatively impacting your bottom line. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system.

Intercom vs Drift vs Customerly: comparison table

Approach customers directly on the website, make connections and drive more sales using LiveChat. Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses. Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time. But the most important thing is that you get a help desk that you believe in—and that you integrate it into a website as thoroughly as possible. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department.

• The platform’s all-inclusive customer service tool supports almost any channel through which businesses can communicate with customers.
• If you have customers who are always on the go, you will need a platform that offers mobile capabilities.
• Given that these are two services predicated on making you better at customer support, you’d think they’d be able to handle it better themselves.
• Dixa is a customer support software that can be used on your website as a widget.
• Very passionate about dogs, topics on spirituality and Unicorns.
• This is an Intercom alternative that focuses on providing a personal touch to the live chat experience.

Plus, its intuitive user interface and comprehensive analytics help you track customer interactions and gain valuable insights into their behavior. With Gist, you can provide the kind of exceptional customer service that will keep them coming back for more. With Crisp, you’ll be able to engage with customers in meaningful ways – from automated conversations to one-on-one interactions. You can also analyze customer feedback in real-time, allowing your team to proactively address any issues or concerns before they become major problems. And finally, Crisp provides support for multiple channels including email, live chat, SMS messaging, and more – so you can reach out to customers wherever they are.

Zendesk has a slight edge when it comes to ticketing, but Intercom’s automation makes up for it

These are just some of the factors that can affect the migration process from Zendesk to Intercom. There may be other aspects that are specific to your business or industry that need to be considered as well. We are Vision Point Systems, a Certified Service Partner of Intercom.

It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further.

Grow your business like a team twice your size.

Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions.

The resolution bot helps you to train your chatbot using several different questions. This way, it can gradually understand the user intent and automatically provide answers to the questions of your users. We’ll focus on key features, integrations, pricing, and plans, as well as customer reviews since you’ll need to know what business owners just like you are saying about them. So we see JavaScript here, we see backend libraries, no, not at a lot of integration with other things like Segment. The actual visual work is actually very similar to what you would see at somewhere like Mixpanel or Amplitude or really any event tracking analytics tool.

Zendesk or Intercom: Workflows and automation

So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies. You can publish your knowledge base articles, divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

• This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience.
• The company was founded in 2004 and offered features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic chat invitations, and integration with popular platforms like Shopify.
• This site does not include all companies or all available Vendors.
• Zendesk has received a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from 2,693 reviewers.
• So it would be easy to start using features like marketing or sales in addition to the support tools.
• In this way, customer interaction is controlled more efficiently.

The usable plan for most businesses starts at the price point of $29/month/agent and includes advanced features such as SLAs, event rules, etc. Unlike the competitor, Jetdocs, they place limits on approval workflows and departments which make Jetdocs better if you are looking for a ticketing platform, if not then Live Agent is a solid platform. If we take a closer look at the features of the Intercom; live chat, shared inbox, and help center is among its most powerful features. It provides great benefits to businesses in processes with solutions such as workflow automation, self-service routine, and automatic response. Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversations with humans.

Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue.

Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms. Every Zendesk installation is set up differently to match each organization’s own process for managing companies, contacts, tickets and related data. So there is no simple “one click” solution for moving this data. Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation.